Better Luck Next Quarter-Century

Well, the first person I saw sing professionally in New York City after I moved here, Chris Cornell, has died (he, along with Soundgarden, was opening for Guns N' Roses at MSG, within months of the time I walked all the way from downtown Seattle to the real Sound Garden sculpture, which was probably rock-inspired foolhardiness in retrospect).

It's odd that we lost the "Blackstar" singer (Bowie), the "sun day or night" singer (Prince), and the "Black Hole Sun" singer (Cornell) in such short succession.

In other timeloop-like reminders of the 90s, I see

(A) the guy who founded Fox News back in that decade, Roger Ailes, has also died, rendering still more obsolete my insider perspective on what an insane company he built,

(B) Twin Peaks, at one time not so long ago the weirdest part of pop culture, restarts this coming Sunday,

(C) a more concerted effort to get NYC Brown alums of the 90s to socialize is apparently afoot,

(D) all the naive post-Cold War dreams of young political ideologues from those days about making society nicer or at least in some way principled are probably falling apart before our eyes, and

(E) as of this week (as teased in a Flash story) we also know that Geoff Johns, who got his start writing for DC Comics back in that decade and has since become DC's co-president, is going to write a rather self-indulgent-sounding comics miniseries called Doomsday Clock, apparently pitting dark Dr. Manhattan from Watchmen against optimistic Superman and perhaps against DC time/continuity itself.

It's as if everything that happened between the last episode of Twin Peaks and the next one is a twenty-six-year "wash," if you ask me (and for me it all went by like a busy long weekend, or perhaps a dreamlike timeloop), so maybe I'll shut up for a while -- or at least avoid online sniping and stick to longer, more thoughtful pieces (coming soon in real magazines, most likely) -- ones that take a more serious stab at increasing the odds of the next quarter-century or so being sane. Yeah, well, we'll see how it goes.